Blood red on a black canvas: the shock of a blossoming anthurium in a desolate landscape of cold, dark lava.
A couple of years ago I visited friends on the big island of Hawaii. One of the many ecological wonders I witnessed was the vast expanse of old lava flows. What especially caught my eye was the occasional flowering plant that burst forth within this barren wasteland. These hardy plants are called anthuriums or bromeliads. Some years after a lava flow, after the lava has cooled, these plants can germinate their wind scattered seeds and root into the lava rock, somehow mining the nutrients needed to grow and flower into a beautiful, bright blossom. They are the forerunners of many other plants that will take root in the lava beds and eventually of a transformed eco-environment. But the initial process of an anthurium’s genesis takes time.
It also took time for our genesis. In terms of planetary history, the emergence of Homo sapiens occurred in the last tenth of one percent of that history. We humans represent the flowering of self-aware, conscious life, evolving from pristine life forms rooted in the elements of mother earth. But our emergence, like that of the anthurium, is not an end state, but the beginning of a transformed eco-environment. In our case, this new environment is what we create for ourselves and our posterity. Consider how human life has changed in just a few thousand years. The world we inhabit is still one composed of land, sea and air and shared with many varied life forms. But it is also a world of cities, organized agriculture, and civilized societies ordered by laws and cultural prescriptions. The objective world we live in is not just the physical one bequeathed by Mother Nature but the subjective creation of our ancestors and ourselves. And we are only at the beginning of this self-created world.
Some of us think we have arrived at the pinnacle of human existence. We have unleashed the power of the atom, traveled to the moon, begun the exploration of our solar system, mined and harvested earth’s resources to support our accelerated population growth. One might conclude, if allowed such hubris, that we truly are masters of the universe. In truth, we have reached the very heights of tribal warfare (ref. “The Rule of the Primate”), genocide, and the potential desolation of mother earth. Has there ever been a more violent time in human history than the twentieth century? Does not the twenty first century face the gravest prospects for human civilization in terms of global warming, rising seas, and pollution of our most basic resources—air, water, and nutrient-rich soil?
To be clear, I believe in the beauty of the anthurium’s bloom and the future of our kind. Clearly, we humans have come a long way. But we can no longer depend upon our physical evolution to improve our species. We are now—more than at any time in our history—accountable for our future AND the preservation of terra firma. We have the science and the technology to do better. We only lack the will. It took Switzerland decades to remove pollution from its waterways. It required less than a decade for America to reverse the effects of acid rain and for the world to reduce the effects of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet rays. Not only can we do better by our physical environment, but we can also improve our lot as global citizens. Whether it’s tribal conflicts in the Middle East or North Africa, epidemics in West Africa, or droughts in America’s farm belt and California’s central valley, we all have a stake in the outcome.
What is needed is a new state of being in every human: not just subjective, but collective; not temporal, but prescient; not possessive, but custodial. To live without compassion for others is to live without reverence for humanity—which is to live without meaning (“vanity of vanities, all is vanity”). We live in a connected world that spans across time and place. What we extract from the earth, how we farm our food, where we dump our waste are activities that not only affect our present, but the future of our posterity. Just as the evolution of our self-awareness has made us cognizant of our limited lifespans and of the necessity to care for our self-preservation, it also makes us aware of our responsibility to care for the planet that bore us. We do not own this earth. We are born its prodigy and should not be prodigal of its bounty.
Much of what happens within the human body is systemically conditioned and unconscious: our lives are grounded in the very elements and processes of nature as medical science has shown. But, by some miracle, we are gifted with a creative awareness: an ability to reflect and learn from our past; the insight to project our future and even to change it; the creative energy to express our innermost experiences and to project what we conceive in language, in the conduct of our lives, and in our art, culture, and civilization. Consciousness is not just a gift of our creation; it is by its nature a godlike quality. It can transcend time and place and create what never before existed. Perhaps the very experience of living in this awareness is not so different than living in the presence of God. If so, how undeserving is it to waste such a gift and not to put it in service to our shared humanity and to the preservation of the earth that engendered us?
Within the cold, bleak vacuum of the universe, we are that blossom in the wilderness.